How Black Men Are Perceived As Pit Bulls

The black male is perceived as a scary pit bull — yet most whites are killed by other whites.

We are the pit bull that is seen with wary eyes; if we come too close, then it's goodbye. Regardless of whether we are calm, courteous and nonthreatening in demeanor, we are deemed suspicious and dangerous, which makes it justifiable to put us down with a bullet or baton upside the crown, or a Taser or a choke until the neck is broke, or any other means deemed a necessity to preserve the sanctity of white skin.

That's the way it's always been since the first ship brought us in.

That is how the black male is perceived in America today — as a pit bull with the brawn and the jaws and the bad reputation.

Because of this, it is "understandable," as columnist Bill O'Reilly put it last week, for nonblack Americans — police, shop owners and people walking down the street — to fear us. It is the disproportionate amount of crime by black males, he says.

This is the trend nouveau No. 1 of the righteous Right: to suggest that nonblack citizens in America are justified in their fear of us and presumably justified in their quickness to think the worse first and act upon it with their own violence.

So it flies for someone to assert that "I felt threatened" or "I feared for my life" and was thus justified in violently standing one's ground in a scenario that would likely have ended differently had the person been of a race other than black.

It's understandable, O'Reilly and others say.

But I find this notion understandably troubling. It suggests that it is not only understandable but acceptable for nonblacks to not distinguish between blacks who are a threat and blacks who are not. It also suggests that if a black is a legitimate threat, you don't bring him in alive but put him down dead. It's because blacks are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime.

But is not racism ultimately a crime of violence against the mind, against the spirit — not just the body?

Trend nouveau No. 2 of the righteous Right is to point out that blacks are more likely to be killed by other blacks (91 percent according to the U.S. Department of Justice) than by white cops or citizens, which suggests we should look away from these incidents of white police/citizens and black male victims.

Well, more whites are killed by other whites in this country (83 percent according to the aforementioned source) than by blacks. Does it mean you should fear your fellow whites rather than the blacks with whom you may seldom interact? Does that mean you focus on that problem and ignore all else?

Former President Jimmy Carter, speaking at Yale University on Tuesday, noted that since the shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, there have been a series of incidents of police shootings of black males, including a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland.

The ugly truth is that all this stuff has been going on for a long time. It's just now that we can see it and track it because of the technology of the smartphone. Carter alluded to the body cameras that President Barack Obama is suggesting for police officers.

Yet, although it might be good to have a camera to see what goes on, I'm not sold on the idea that it is a deterrent to police misconduct. A camera in a police car did not stop a South Carolina police officer from shooting a black man who reached in his car for his license.

He saw a pit bull, not a man.

In my 20 years of teaching, I have heard many white students talk about how their generation is different from their parents' and their grandparents' generations. They don't harbor the racism of their parents or their proclivity to discriminate, they say.

But these police killings of black males are done by officers of their generation. They echo the mentality of the past into which we seem to be slipping.

Something more needs to be done with regard to the mindset of what is "understandable" in the minds of many white Americans, particularly those in law enforcement.